Construction of the Earnings and Benefits File (EBF) for Use With the Health and Retirement Survey

Analysts using the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) often require information on earnings, labor market attachment, and social security benefits in order to better understand the factors affecting retirement and well-being at older ages. To this end, several derived variables were constructed and documented in the Earnings and Benefits File (EBF) described here. The EBF provides a set of summary earnings, employment, and social security wealth measures for a subset of HRS respondents in Wave 1 of the survey, for whom administrative records are available. The EBF, a restricted data file, is available from the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research for matching only with versions of the HRS containing geographic detail no finer than the Census Division level. Interested users should contact hrsquest@umich.edu by email for further information on access to the data.